Released from Medical House Arrest

     I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, with the result that I have been released from medical house arrest. I can drive again. I can walk outside, and I can put my foot flat on the floor as long as I'm wearing shoes.

    Was I still limping when I left the doctor's office because my foot hurt or because I was afraid it would hurt? Or out of habit?

    The first thing I did was get in the car and drive to Rogue Roasters for a latte. I felt the freedom of a teenager with her first driver's license. I can go where I want when I want. 

    I went to Rogue Roasters and had a latte.

    Then I went to the grocery store, just for the pleasure of walking up and down the aisles and seeing what was there.   

     If I wear the big, restrictive boot, the doctor said, I could take walks outdoors. When I asked if I could walk the quarter-mile down the hill on a gravel road to the mailbox, he raid, "Listen to your foot."

   My foot says, "Not too fast." It says, "I feel swollen. Can you put some ice on me?" It says, "Whew! This is weird." It says, "How nice to feel the floor under my shoe again."

   The day after I drove home, I took my first walk since well before Christmas. I marveled at the hard frost on the dirt road. I skirted storm-strewn puddles. I walked with the nip of fresh air on my cheeks and through sunrays dappled on the path. I walked through the winter silence of the forest. When I stopped to listen to it, I heard an overwintering bird chirping a staccato rhythm in the leaves. I walked a quarter-mile through the woods, a distance which, as I was limping and lurching and stopping frequently to gaze around me, took forty-five minutes.

    It was a joyous walk. 

    I am outdoors again.

The Way I Like to Cook

     Tonight I will have fish stacks for dinner—three corn tortillas layered with Alaska cod (sautéed with onions, tomatoes, lemon juice, and oregano) and feta cheese, baked for ten minutes, and topped with  yogurt with a smidgeon more oregano. Yum.

    How do I know it's yummy? 

    Because I had it last night. And I'll probably have it again tomorrow night.  

    I like to cook by recipe, and, since recipes generally come proportioned for four (or more), I cook a dish for four and don't have to cook again for four days. Sometimes I halve the recipe. Sometimes I stagger two recipes. Sometimes I freeze dinners. I like to cook one-dish meals—I don't do a slab of meat and sides. My usual dessert is yogurt with tahini and honey.

    I have 32 cookbooks and four years' worth of Bon Appétit magazines, a great source of recipes. Some cookbooks are so well used they're falling apart.

Others, like the two-volume Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages, I have never actually cooked from, but I'm always thinking I will. Some, like Great Recipes from around the World, Paul Pépin's Art of the Chicken, and the Heritage of America Cookbook, are just simply beautiful books. I have some old standbys, like the Joy of Cooking and the Moosewood Cookbook, and some specialty cookbooks, like the Cake Bible. I have a box of well-worn, fifty-year-old handwritten recipes and another, neater box of cut-out-and-pasted-on recipes.

I have a couple of collections of family recipes. One is called Quick and Easy and Sometimes Good. One of my cookbooks, "The Prize-winning Recipes from the Pyrofax Gas Teen-age Baking Contest," has a recipe from me in it.

    When my mother gave me a small specialty cookbook entitled The Twelve Days of Christmas Cookbook, with a wassail recipe I still use, she inscribed it not "To Diana, who loves to cook," but "To Diana, who loves cookbooks."                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Kindness to Friends and Strangers

    People have been overwhelmingly kind to me while I have been house-bound after foot surgery. They have picked up groceries, taken me to appointments, brought me lunch (and left a dinner at the same time), called to check in, stoked the woodbin with firewood, brought me books, and emptied my garbage. 

    It warms my heart to know that kindness among friends remains high, especially when kindness among strangers seems to be diminishing. Not only do we have fewer interactions with strangers— grocery-store clerks, bank tellers, librarians—now that we can self-help ourselves with those tasks, but anger and greed from the general public seem to be squeezing dry our opportunities to do a kindness to a stranger. For instance:

    When I noticed the low-air icon lit up on my dashboard a few months ago, I stopped at the gas station in Jacksonville to have them put air in it, as I have an unreasonable fear that the tire will blow up in my face if I do it.

       The gas station attendant said no, he wouldn't do that for me. 

    "It's a new policy," he said, "We can't put oil in the car or air in the tires. We can't do anything except put gas in the gas tank."

     The reason, he said, was that the company has been sued by people who claim things like their car blew up because of the oil the attendant put in it.

    Too many suits, too many angry people looking to cast blame.

    The man stammered a bit more and then said, "Oh, I'll do it. I'm the manager. There's no one here to tell me I can't."

    That was kind. 

    But it's heck of a world, isn't it? if a person isn't allowed to do a kindness to a stranger. Thank goodness we still do kindnesses to our friends and that a sense of doing a kindness to a stranger can override unnecessary rules.

2022Janus2023

     I look back over my 2022 calendar, and everything seems so long ago! Was it only nine months ago that I was skiing in Alaska? Only since June that I had COVID on a river cruise in France? Only three months ago that I hiked the Dolomites? Has Russia been sowing destruction in Ukraine for less that a year? It seems like it has been forever! Is it like that every year? Or is there something about the passage of time as one ages that makes time pass differently?

Time Changes (A Nonet)

Time changes, as one ages, from breeze to whirlwind.

The grandchild you played with suddenly teen-age different.

Childhood memories stay fresh, undisturbed by maelstroms

While time's windstorms destroy yesterday's memories.

The years collapse into days

Brief as dandelion puffs

Caught by wind

Gone into

Time

One-footed

    It is now two weeks after my foot surgery. Two down, ten to go! 

    I spent the first few days at the home of my podiatrist, who is a friend I have skied with for years. How lucky could I get? I was in good hands for those crucial few days!

    Then my son drove down from Washington to help me transition to one-footed life at my house. He rearranged furniture, figured out the shower, and did a hundred other things to make it easier for me to hop through the house on a walker. (The bandaged foot was strictly non-weight-bearing.) He replaced the damaged bathroom sink, unclogged the kitchen sink, and brought a fir tree in from the woods, set it up, and strung it with lights so I could decorate it. (The ornaments hang only as high as the branches I could reach from a chair.) Before he left for home, he chopped kindling and filled my wood bin. 

    So I am doing fine. I have even kind of enjoyed the challenge of figuring things out—how to build a fire in the stove, how to sweep the floor from a chair. Friends have rallied to my cause. They have come to visit, brought dinners, picked up my groceries, read poetry with me, and brought wine. 

    Yesterday a friend drove me to my doctor's appointment. The doctor was so pleased the X-rays and the look of the foot that he has allowed me to walk in a boot that keeps my toes off the ground!

My heel responded with a surprised twinge when it touched the floor for the first time. 

    It is thrilling to be one step closer to the end of the twelve-week process. Maybe even, at my next doctor's appointment a month from now, I'll be allowed to drive.

    All this time I have been acutely aware of the three people I know who have had a leg amputated. At some point my doctor is going to say, "Excellent. Good job. Walk, ski, hike—you have your foot back." For my three friends, there was no going back. I am filled with admiration for their fortitude, and respect for the difficulties they have faced—and gratitude that my condition is temporary and that I have so many friends who have stepped in to help. 

    I move towards the New Year with that gratitude foremost, wishing for you the same fulfilling emotion and that you and all people, creatures, and plants of the world will know and happiness.

They

     Pronouns are tricky. All my English-teacher life I tried to get students to understand that "they" is plural and "everyone," for instance, is singular, that it is incorrect to say, "Everyone hung up their hat." Correct usage when I  was in college was, "Everyone hung up his hat," but the women's movement made it clear that that wiped out half the population with one pronoun. So then we said, "Everyone hung up his or her hat," which is awkward, so everyone went on using "their" in the singular, anyway, saying, "Everyone hung up their hat" without thinking about it. (Wikipedia tells me that this possessive form of "they" has been used since the fourteenth century. I should have known that while I was teaching English! I wouldn't have tried so hard.)

    In today's language a new use of the third-person plural pronoun (they, them, their) has been introduced. Some people who fit into neither the male nor the female box ask to be referred to as "they," in the singular. English teachers wail and other people rebel, but I find this a reasonable way to make language fit reality.

    Besides the half-accepted use of "they" with a singular antecedent illustrated above, there is another precedent for using a once-plural-only pronoun in the singular. "You" used to be a plural pronoun. "Thee," "thou," and "thine" were the singular forms. Gradually—or suddenly, as far as I know—that usage fell out of favor. No doubt English teachers wailed and other people rebelled, but today we easily say, "You are going with me," whether there are fifteen people going or only one.

    I admit it's hard to adjust to, but I like this new use of "they." It's a good solution to a real problem. And we'll get used to it. We'll even be able to say, "They can get it theirself" in the right context. We don't blink an eye when someone asks us for something and we say, "I'd be glad to, but you can get it yourself." Language changes, and I, for one, am proud to see English accommodating itself to another population that has in the past been wiped out by a pronoun.

     

Doing Away with Hallux Rigidus

     I have put away my hiking boots, and it's not because it's ski season, because I've put away my ski boots, too, and it's not because there's no snow. My favorite outdoor activities will be curtailed for a while as I carefully nurse my right foot back to pre-surgery—and I mean way pre-surgery—normality. I hope what I mean is back to what the foot was like before the hallux rigidus that set in forty years ago and finally drove me to surgery.

    Hallux rigidus means a "rigid big toe," and what that means is that the big toe joint doesn't bend (it's an arthritic condition), but, of course, in even normal walking and especially in skiing and hiking, the big toe wants to bend. But trying to bend hurts. How badly it can hurt can be ascertained from my blog post on the last day of hiking the Dolomites last September, where a 7,700-foot descent in a nine-and-a-half-hour day was causing a great deal of pain. My podiatrist friend, Monika, recommended surgery. "Diana," she said. "No more pain."

    The surgeon demurred. He said he wouldn't guarantee no more pain but that he would guarantee less pain, which sounded pretty good to me.

    Of course, at the moment, with surgery only two days behind me, I am in more, and more constant, pain, but that'll go away. I am staying with Monika for the first few days after surgery.

(What good luck that my podiatrist is a friend!) Tomorrow my son will come down from Washington to take me home and help me adjust to one-footed living at my mountain home. The doctor has fused the big toe of my right foot and put in a pin, so I am to be non-weight-bearing on that foot till the doctor tells me I can do otherwise. He says that recovery is generally twelve weeks. 

    All right, then—skiing on March 8. And then the hiking, and I am predicting a lot less pain. And if that's true, it'll be worth it to go through it all again on the left foot.